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Wednesday, August 22, 2012

The Country Homemaker Hop #34

Welcome Friends!

I love how nicely my plants grow in August. These late planted Mammoth sunflowers are now between 6' and 9' tall and are providing my hens with some nice late afternoon shade.

My hens were 19 weeks old on Monday and in the last three days I have seen three more hens start to lay eggs. That's FIVE hens laying now! They're sneaky though. I have only caught two of them in the act so I am still not sure who is laying yet...

This place looks like a jungle. I had so many extra plants this spring and I hate killing things so I planted LOTS of extras without support in odd places. Things are working out alright though so far. These armenian cucumbers and sugar lump cherry tomatoes are sprawling over and down a retaining wall.

I planted some winter luxury pie pumpkins early this year. They're already ripe. I read about making the pies and freezing them uncooked on our local homesteading blog and I plan to do that with a few of them this weekend. I'll report back how well it goes.

I have been canning like a mad woman.

pickles

peaches

watermelon

and now tomatoes... I tried a "new to me" recipe for pizza sauce that cuts tomato processing time in half AND really accentuates the tomato flavor via oven roasting.

There is no skinning involved either and it thickens much quicker. The roasting really helps dehydrate the tomatoes.

You just roast, puree, and can! You can see this recipe HERE from the wonderful website Simple Bites. The author offers three methods to prepare the tomatoes and a few of her family recipes for the pizza sauce. I chose method #3 to prepare the tomatoes and her cousin Amber's sauce recipe though I added a bit of cinnamon to mine too. My husband liked it so much that he made himself a plate full of mini pizzas today for lunch with a jar from this first batch. it's good stuff! Well, now you know what I've been doing. It's YOUR turn to link up and share what you have been doing this week around your homestead. Thanks for your participation and support.